What’s that rumbling sound you may have heard emanating recently from the general vicinity of upper downtown and Lindbergh Field? Was it the product of some marvelous new Boeing contraption spooling up its power plants before commencing its takeoff roll? Or something else—something more ominous?

Some would attribute the sound to the thunder of pony hooves. Ponies ridden by Genghis Kahn’s Mongol horde. Here they are, sweeping in from the rain-drenched northern steppes to sack and pillage the minions of San Diego, held sway by the benevolent Lords of the Local Manor since the Great Beginning. Here to conquer and take no prisoners.

But to others, the rumble is a welcome sound, merely the earth shaking under a well-oiled, finely-tuned machine designed to offer another way—a more convenient and cheaper way—for the populace to reach the Promised Land.

Sound farfetched? Perhaps a few hundred years and a continent out of context? Maybe so, but the underlying story here is not entirely unlike history repeating itself. This version of recent events, as told by several local Web content providers, would cast the part of the Great Kahn with Bill Gates, Lord of Microsoft, and his Mongol Raiders played by the folks at San Diego Sidewalk, the newest entrant in the battle for supremacy of the local content Web site providers.

According to one telling of the story, beginning about a year ago the raiders swept in from the steppes of Redmond with a battle plan and have since been stealing that which rightfully belongs to the Lords of the Local Manor. In other words, Microsoft’s San Diego Sidewalk is competing for local Web content with the local purveyors of same: the Union-Tribune’s SignOn San Diego, the Transcript’s San Diego Source, San Diego Magazine’s San Diego Online, Cox Interactive Media’s San Diego Insider and AOL’s Digital City, to name the most dominant of the local establishment. To them, the forthcoming battle is over the hearts and minds of local merchants and consumers. And, of course, which lord, or lords, offer the best path to the Promised Land, that perfect way to use the Web to its full potential for your personal lifestyle decisions.

And to the bystanders, the serfs (this is the early English rendition of the modern usage "Net surfers") of Local Manor, the battle appears to be taking on epic proportions. A battle being repeated in fiefdoms throughout the land. Places like San Francisco, Southern California (Los Angeles and Orange County), Chicago, Boston and New York to name a few. They’re not after the sort of spoils the Great Kahn would comprehend. No, this battle is about who gets the lion’s share of local merchant advertising. This battleground is the Web, the combatants are the purveyors of local content and they want your browser and mouse to click through their site—again and again. The more clicks the better. Because each time you do, somewhere out in the ether known as the Internet, there’s a computer ringing up another hit. If you listen very closely, you can almost hear the sound of money changing hands.

We begin by talking with Moya Gollaher, General Manager of Microsoft’s San Diego Sidewalk, with portentous timing. San Diego Sidewalk went live November 19. At our first meeting in mid-September, Gollaher was reluctant to disclose any significant differentiating features or competitive advantages planned for the San Diego Sidewalk Web site. However, subsequent meetings and conversations, culminating with the site going live, brought those unspoken things into clear focus. From her office in the Old Mission Brewery Plaza, Gollaher and some 26 editorial, design, writing and administrative staff are a mere stone’s throw from the threshold of San Diego Lindbergh field’s runway 27.

M.G.: It is intended to be a city guide that is an enabling technology. It can help people make the most of their free time—it’s for anyone who finds themselves in a social rut...whether it’s figuring out what movie to go to tonight, or what restaurant may be new and fun to try out...this is a comprehensive database that we have built upon with our own original reviews and analysis in the categories of restaurants, places to go, sports, recreation, arts and music, movies. We are looking at the fun side of life, providing a comprehensive Web site that is free to anyone who has access to the Internet. It is designed for city residents in those markets that have a high percentage of computer users and access to the Internet, hence the choice of nine cities that we are launching in this year.

M.G.: Boy, are we spending a lot of time on that right now. We have local teams in each city. Everyone from editors, writers and designers. The reason for doing that is so we can distinguish our cities one from another within the framework of common content areas that we all want to cover. While we are telling everyone here about San Diego Sidewalk, we recognize the people using our service are technology savvy, they travel and we want them to be aware of what’s going on in New York or Seattle when they go there, etc., so we want to balance that common content area with a local look and feel.

M.G.: We sit down and ask ourselves if we are going to be using photographs like New York does. New York...everyone wears black, you’ve got the skyscraper kind of look. San Diego—completely wrong. Different look and colors—the aura of this city is completely different. We want to reflect that in the colors we use and the graphics we choose. We’ll probably use a lot more graphic imagery than some of the other sites. The intent is to have more of the San Diego feeling and substance of what we are about in San Diego.

M.G.: Yes, absolutely.

M.G.: We’re about that category of dealing with that fun side of your life. We’re about recreation and arts and movies and entertainment. As opposed to news, community events, chat. What we are focusing on is sports, recreation, where to eat, what to do, insider tips. That’s what is special about us. We want to spur people to take action. We are going to present our information in a way that people can get into our site, find what they need quickly, and get out and act on it. We think that is something that will benefit our advertisers as well. These are people who take action...they are active, involved. I wouldn’t say our site is not a particularly reflective one.

M.G.: It’s real hard for me to see them as direct competitors, because the scope of what they are covering is a lot broader than what we cover.

M.G.: Connected is the key. Access to the Internet is the metric we look at when we look at markets. San Diego, from what we can tell from recent information, is close to having 33% of its population with access to the Internet.

M.G.: I would entertain working with local content providers of quality content, particularly of content we can’t produce ourselves effectively. In fact, we are working with local groups such as the San Diego Performing Arts League. They can provide us with information about all the theaters in town and ticketing in a way that is authoritative...it makes much more sense for us to get that kind of information from them than for us to reinvent the wheel.

M.G.: Not right now. I won’t say never; that’s a long time. What Sidewalk is about is a consumer service. We are really interested in exposing as many people as possible to what we think is really terrific content and really pushing that. That has the greatest potential in a local market.

M.G.: The ability people have to personalize the product. They can take the product and format it in a way that gives them the information they need. If you don’t care about movies and all you really want to know about is the ten best places to hike in San Diego, or you want to be informed about who’s coming to town...then we can personalize your visit for just that information. We can even send you emails if you want, to remind you that the concert you wanted to go to is coming, and you had better get out there and buy tickets now before they are all sold out.

M.G.: The customer has to select the option to personalize information. We’re sensitive to issues of privacy. We are consumers as well. We aren’t going to sell this information to others. The customer asks for the personalization feature; we don’t require it. We think it is a much richer application if they do, but it isn’t required.

M.G.: First and foremost, they are measuring awareness of our site and usage of our site.

M.G.: The marketing efforts that we follow are pretty broad. We’re doing everything from consumer marketing, trying to be as creative as we can, particularly because we have such a fun product. There are many areas that lend themselves to promotional activities. It will be up to us to be as creative and scrappy as we can be in the consumer audience. There are also business users. A lot of our usage happens during the day. We have a broad audience.

Who will be the winners of this titanic struggle? For the time being, it appears merchants and consumers will be the big winners. Like any commodity in great supply, the owners of such commodity will continue to seek new and creative ways to make their product better, faster, more innovative and less costly. All this to attract more customers and create demand for their particular variation of the commodity. It’s called market differentiation, and for so long as there are at least two or more players vying for the hearts and minds of the local minions using the Web, the battle will rage and the road to the Promised Land will be blessed by plenty.

On November 18, the day before San Diego Sidewalk went live, I visit briefly with Gollaher again. Sidewalk is in its new digs in another part of the Mission Brewery complex. This time I’m there to get the proverbial "dog and pony show." The mayhem and confusion, created by impossible deadlines and too many people in too little space, I sensed a few weeks earlier has been replaced by anticipation of the rush to come from the first real salvos soon to be fired. The troops are ready, the cannons loaded; now to go forth and conquer.

The dog and pony show goes off without a hitch; in fact, the site is impressive in its visual appeal, organization and depth. The personalization features are unique for this genre of Web site in San Diego. How long will that remain the case? It’s only a matter of time. Sidewalk has moved the bar higher by a couple of notches.

As I leave the Brewery Plaza after my last meeting with Gollaher, she stops me briefly on my way out the door. "One thing I wanted to make certain I communicate clearly," she says, "contrary to what some people have been saying, San Diego Sidewalk was developed by local people—local talent living in San Diego. This is not something done by the folks in Redmond." Message delivered, I resume my exit just as a jumbo jet on final approach passes low overhead. The building shakes and I flinch ever so slightly, almost like one ducking an annoying insect. Inside Sidewalk’s offices, the cacophony of the low-flying jet is ignored by the others. After all, there’s a market to conquer, and if the rumble of the jet is mistaken by Sidewalk’s competitors for the pounding hooves of imaginary ponies ridden by Mongol invaders from the northern steppes, so much the better. It means Sidewalk’s competitors are paying attention to the wrong stuff.

Granny WWWiz likes to go to the movies, but she hates spending more time drilling down through lots of levels of a site to find movies and theaters than it takes to look ‘em up in the newspaper. And she sure gets cranky when the information she finds is incomplete, incorrect or just plain convoluted. Granny says, "Show me a Web site that does movie listings the right way and I’ll show you a useful Web site." No one ever accused Granny of being simpleminded; she just likes to keep things simple. Seemed reasonable enough, so we asked Granny WWWiz to check out the San Diego Sidewalk Web site the next time she wanted to see a movie. Here’s what she found:

"I like that Grisham guy. Writes a good piece now and again. Handsome kid, got lots of money. Anyway, got it in my mind to check out his latest, The Rainmaker. The Chargers were getting manhandled, so why not? I got wired to this new-fangled Sidewalk site and surfed around a bit. Then I got serious and looked for the Grisham kid’s latest."

"(1) Maps to theaters with zoom feature; cool but maybe need more detail, some key street names needed for navigation are missing; (2) Showtimes past the current time of day are in gray font; very cool; (3) Click two levels down and you’re there; very good; (4) Personalized Web surfing. I like that. No need to see all that other stuff, just the stuff I’m interested in; (5) Happened to stumble into a write-up about the Silver Cinema in Rancho Bernardo. Used to be a Mann theater that had become run down. Now I see it’s under new management, been refurbished and all the movies are $1.50. That fits my Social Security budget. And that’s information I can use. Very cool surprise; (6) Theaters and restaurants in the area nicely tied together. All that action at the movie always makes me hungry, especially for chicken after watching ‘Alien Resurrection.’ "

"(1) Someone doesn’t know the Coast from Inland. Oceanside is by the ocean; Rancho Bernardo isn’t. DUH! (2) The movie and theater list scrolls mighty slow, even on my 250 Mhz PowerMac. I’m gettin’ too old to wait on scrolling."

"Not bad, considering it’s just now online. Like my bottle of Boone’s Farm, it’ll get better with age. Still like the Digital City movie finder better. That checkbox thing they have is mighty handy, especially if you are thinking about several possible movie choices, not just one. On the other hand, the personalization I can do with this site is way cool. Just look at the stuff within my neighborhood if I want. Have to give that a try."